


the only place

by tigrrmilk



Category: FF (Comics)
Genre: F/M, Gen, bad superhero science, i don't drink coffee why is this all about coffee, ill-advised school trips, those cups are called anthora cups but why would scott know that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-31
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 15:44:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1393267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk/pseuds/tigrrmilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>ask anyone, and they'll tell you the same thing: scott lang needs to get the fuck out of new york.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the only place

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pocky_slash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pocky_slash/gifts).



> i have only read the fraction/allreds run of FF and a lot of my background knowledge of the marvel universe comes from the cinematic universe (although i've tried to make this as COMICS as possible), so sorry for any errors. 
> 
> title is from the song by best coast.

“I’m not sure what I’m looking at here,” Scott says, and scrubs a hand over his face. He pushes down hard on his eyes with his fingers and the heel of his hand. He feels sort of like he’s coming apart, like maybe Reed and his family only missed out on disintegrating at a molecular level by passing that fate on to him.

Sometimes he wouldn’t mind that so much.

“It’s a paper,” Bentley says, and waves it around like he’s just finished conducting Beethoven’s Fifth. Is that a complicated one? Scott doesn’t really know.

“Don’t worry Mr. Lang, we didn’t steal your research,” Onome says, and squints at her own sheath of paper as she flicks through. “Ah!”

She pulls a couple of sheets out and holds them up to Scott. He can see a couple of photos of himself - and they had definitely not asked whether or not they could take them, so maybe some kind of ethics/social boundaries class is due - and some diagrams, but that’s about all that he can work out. He wishes he was asleep.

Reed stands next to him thoughtfully, and stretches out his arm to catch the rest of the paper when it slips out of Onome’s hands. “This is very...” he says. “I can see why they’d be interested at the Institute.”

Bentley smirks, which is kind of like a normal child smiling, but more terrifying.

Scott takes a sip of his coffee. It’s cold.

“Why don’t you take me through it slowly,” he says. “It’ll be good practice.”

“Ugh, we’re never going to have to present to idiot non-specialists.” Bentley flops down on the floor and starts to wildly flick through the pages, saying random phrases out loud that just mean nothing, Scott’s sure.

Onome looks at him with her mouth twisted a bit. Reed gives her her papers back and says, “We’ll discuss it.”

Scott has no idea what the hell is happening, and isn’t sure he wants to find out.

He could really do with some more coffee, though.

 

***

 

“N-no. No, no, no. Absolutely not,” Scott says. He pinches the skin between his eyebrows.

“Scott,” Sue says, “have some more coffee.”

She fills his cup, and he stares at the small amount of froth on the top. He stares at it until all of the bubbles pop and the top is clear and black, and then he sighs.

“Neither Reed nor I can really afford to leave New York anytime soon,” Sue says. “After our last trip... it’s good for our children to have some stability. Good for us, too. It’s our home.”  
  
She pauses and taps on her chin.

“But you can’t just... when’s the last time you went somewhere, Scott? Vacation? Visited Darla on tour?”  
  
Scott groans and covers his head in his hands. “I do fine. Besides, anywhere other than New York, you can’t get those proper coffee cups with the blue pattern on.”

“I’m sure that’s what you told her,” Sue says, flatly. She looks at their cups. They’re just white.

“She never asked me to be there,” Scott says. “It’s not like you think.”  
  
They sip on their drinks and share the last of a plate of cookies in the shape of Ben’s face that the moloids had presented him with at breakfast. They taste like ginger snaps and liquorice. Scott tries to hold the taste on his tongue, but his mouth burns and his chest heaves.

“Think about it,” Sue says. “It’d be nice for you to get away. Weather’s nice this time of year.”  
  
“I bet it’s not,” Scott says, and then he feels bad so he swallows too much coffee and chokes on it.

 

***

 

At dinner Reed says “I’ve booked your plane tickets,” and when Scott blanches Reed says “oh dear, I forgot that you hadn’t said yes yet,” and Scott sees Onome watching them, her fork halted halfway between her plate and her mouth.

Bentley flicks two peas at Scott, but he bats them away. After the kids have run away to their evening trip with Jen and Ben, he bites his knuckle.

“Two kids,” he says, “all that way, by myself?”

“I never said you’d be by yourself,” Reed says. He’s got Onome and Bentley’s paper spread out across a table in his lab and he’s marking it up with a bright orange pen. When Scott doesn’t answer, he finally looks up. Scott’s got his hands out, and they’re empty, and Reed can’t tell if he looks relieved or insulted.

 

***

 

Scott phones up Darla, and gets her machine (shut up, whatever they call it on the newest Stark Phones), and says “Reed just told me that he’s asked you to do this thing too, and that your tour ends there anyway? which I did know... and it’d be great to see you but I’m not sure, uh, about the trip I mean,” and then he’s cut off and he stares at his phone for a while and remembers that he was supposed to call her a couple of days ago but he was too busy not sleeping to remember that then, and she hadn’t called him.

She had texted him a photo of herself in her final costume of the night, though. Scott hasn’t seen the show since its first night in New York, but he remembers it well. She has lots of costumes, but this one is just silver leggings and a pink sweater with a yellow “4” in the middle. In the photo, she’s smiling, and pointing at the 4.

Scott looks at it before he goes to bed. But it doesn’t help him sleep.

 

***

 

Darla texts him the next day, while he’s still in bed. “i don’t listen to voice messages” she says, and Scott’s heart’s in his throat because what if she’s just sick of hearing from him but then she’s included an emoji of a happy face so he thinks it’s maybe okay.

She follows it up with another one: “just get on a plane xxx”

He makes a face at his phone, and he stretches, and he tries not to count how much sleep he got. He stretches his back and then pushes his arms out in front of him to stretch them too, but it’s like he can’t do it, he can’t break the tension. He stays like that for a while before he guesses he should probably just go to breakfast.

 

***

 

“Why not Dragon Man?” Scott says, as he leans on the counter while Reed does something to the espresso machine that Scott kind of hopes will allow him to inhale the caffeine.

“I believe that it would be difficult to get clearance for Dragon Man to fly, commercially,” Reed says, “It’s not easy to get a passport for somebody who has no birth certificate, biometric data and who is named Dragon Man.”

“Well, when you put it like that...” Scott watches as Dragon Man picks up some of Bentley’s detritus. Bentley has decided to build a city from hash browns all over the breakfast table this morning. There’s a good approximation of a monorail which Onome is working on, and Alex is furiously eating the thing as quickly as he can manage.

“This is a school,” Alex says, with a mouth full of potato, as angrily as he can muster.

“Potato Town!” Tong cries.

“He doesn’t like the cold much, either,” Reed says, thoughtfully. Scott looks back at him and the espresso machine, and makes a face when he realises that Reed is using it for non-coffee related purposes.

“You have a lab,” he says, as the green foam drips out of the machine. It smells weird.

“Yes,” Reed agrees. “Probably don’t drink anything from this today.”

But he doesn’t make any signs that he’s going to move, so Scott does.

 

***

 

Scott’s not head of the FF anymore, either of them, but he does some teaching and he hangs around because honestly while he’s not doing well he’s doing less terribly than he was before all of this started. He thinks so.

He hasn’t been back to his apartment - his real apartment - in a while. He wakes up and goes to sleep in a little room with none of the things he owns in it, and Cassie has never been here, and she has never seen him like this, and this is good and this is so awful that he takes horrible shaky breaths in, and out, and in, and he looks at the photo Darla sent him and touches it and then it goes away because that’s what happens with touchscreen phones, and then the screen fades to black.

Scott likes his room here.

 

***

 

“Why don’t you tell me about Pym particles,” Onome says, and Scott starts. He’d been alone in the lab, staring into space, and he’s not sure how long he’s been there for. But it’s getting dark outside, and he supposes lessons are probably over (as much as the FF even really has formal lessons, anyway).

“Onome,” he says. “Hi.”

“I’d just really like to know,” she says, and she sounds uncertain, but not insincere. She has a notebook, and a pen.

Scott almost tells her that she’d be better off talking to Reed, but then he realises that if he is thinking of himself as less capable of talking to humans than Reed Richards, then something is seriously off.

“Sure,” he says. “I can tell you what I know. Reed’s got the brain though.”

He hits himself on the head with his knuckles, and Onome makes a face but doesn’t say anything. Scott takes a deep breath, and pulls up some slides.

 

***

 

“The World’s Smartest Man thing is bullshit, you know,” Jen says to Scott later that evening, when she’s working on some Lawyer Stuff and he’s looking for something to eat. The kitchen is quiet, and the rest of the building isn’t. Some of the children are playing hide-and-seek, but there’s nowhere to hide in here. She’s got a spoon in her mouth from the yoghurt she’s eating and she’s staring murderously at a sheet of paper, but she looks up and quirks her mouth up a bit when Scott doesn’t say anything back.

“You’ve met him,” Scott says.

“I’ve met a man who I’m surprised remembers to smile when something pleases him, yeah,” Jen says. “Law school teaches you stuff, though. Like. Everybody’s plenty smart and everybody’s fuckin’ stupid.”

Scott never went to college so he never learnt any such thing, but he doesn’t really want to say that to Jen. He wonders if the cheese at the back of the fridge is his. He likes cheese. He could probably eat some cheese.

“As a friend of mine and yours would probably say,” Jen says, as she scrapes the last of her yoghurt out of the pot, “Don’t be a dummy, dummy.”

It’s one of the weirder pep talks that Scott’s ever received, and it doesn’t occur to him until he’s eating a cheese sandwich, cross-legged on his bed, that she probably spoke to Onome.

 

***

 

“Do they know that Onome and Bentley are kids?” Scott asks.

“I’m sure they’ve seen stranger things,” Reed says. “I think they had some Kree presenting a paper there last year.”

“Kree are less likely to try and build a metropolis out of the breakfast buffet,” Scott says, although he doesn’t really know that at all, but he thinks it’s probably true.

 

***

 

Scott’s flown before, of course he has, he was an avenger you know? But he’s more used to flying in the quinjet with whoever’s ended up flying the thing while they strategise than, like, flying commercially. They serve food and let you read, it’s very unnerving.

He looks up hotels, rubs his palm across his face, and books rooms in the first one he looks at.

 

***

 

He calls Darla, and she answers. He tries to remember what country she’s in, but he can’t. He looks up at the poster he has on the wall, and can’t remember what day it is. She sounds awake, though, so he thinks it’s ok.

“Hi, Scott,” she says.

“I’ve booked a hotel for the week,” he says, “do you, are you already staying somewhere?”  
  
“I can change,” she says.

“I mean, I have my own room, so - but you don’t -”

Darla laughs. “You’re so romantic,” she says.

Scott blushes and then remembers that at least she can’t see that.

“How’s the tour?” he asks.

“Oh, you know,” she says. “Bright.”

 

***

 

Scott goes to the lab after breakfast one morning to find Bentley and Dragon Man. Bentley is at one of the computers playing Granny’s Garden, while Dragon Man gives him cryptic tips.

“Uh,” Scott says. Reed is in a corner, doing something with a microscope.

“I need to know something about Pym Particles for my paper,” Bentley says, eyes narrowed, “and Reed won’t tell me because he says I should ask you.”

Reed doesn’t acknowledge that he is even in the room.

Bentley has Onome’s notes, but he thinks there’s something missing.

“I thought you weren’t stealing my research,” Scott mumbles, but he pulls up the slides and looks for the gap. “You know, Hank’s pretty good on recuperation.”  
  
“For _one_ of the axes,” Bentley says, contemptuously.

Scott grins a little bit.

 

***

 

Sometimes when Scott dreams, he changes size unconsciously. He never gets bigger, and he never gets small enough that it’s hazardous, but it happens. He once woke up almost half a foot shorter than usual, and didn’t realise until he was halfway through breakfast and realised that everything was just slightly too big.

Nobody else had noticed. Or maybe, they hadn’t wanted to ask.

Scott had spent the whole day like that, just because, and it gave him a headache.

 

***

 

Scott gives them skin samples and blood samples and shows them how to use his equipment, because, hey. It’s not long now - they’ll be presenting in two weeks. Darla’s calls and texts are becoming more frequent as her tour comes to its close, and Scott is really, really glad that he’s going to see her again. They’d been on a handful of small dates - if you could really call them that - before she’d had to start the tour, and he’s really eager to actually... see her. Live near her again.

Not that a trip in which he’s got to look after Bentley will be romantic, but. There’ll be moments, he’s sure.

Apparently the institute has a small collection of musical instruments, and there’s some kind of Skrull theremin that she’s arranged to see

“It’s a whole room,” she says, “it’s like a haunted house.”

The conference is only a couple of days, so they’ll do the usual things - there are museums, and shops, and they’re going to visit Braddock Academy on their way back. Scott has filled up his phone’s calendar with things, and he thinks that it’ll be good to get away and not have to think.

He puts his hands down on the lab table and thinks the problem is that research involves entirely too much thinking.

He hears a bang and a small, resigned, “ow!” from Reed’s part of the lab, but he’s getting good at ignoring that now.

 

***

 

Scott has another run of nights when he can’t sleep. He texts Darla and she texts back, and just tells him about her day and her new wig, which is a deep red, as she can’t do anything to help him sleep from where she is. Drink less coffee, she says. But Scott’s happy inside his vicious circle. Or at least, sometimes he can cope with it. Maybe not right now. She sends a photo, and he smiles at it, although his eyes are strained and dry and he can’t keep them open but he can’t keep them closed, either.

 

***

 

The day comes, and Reed drives them to JFK. Scott looks out at Queens and says, “why does anybody leave New York?”

Nobody answers.

Onome and Bentley are playing a noisy game of thumb war.

“Well, it beats me,” Scott mumbles, and stares out of the window for the rest of the way there.

 

***

 

They stare at the plane from the departure gate. Scott had fantasies of being turned away at the TSA checks because of prison or he wore the wrong kind of belt or something, but he gets through quickly, they all do, and then all that’s left is to get Shake Shack burgers and stand by the departure gate and look at the planes.

“I bet you could shrink one of those,” Benley says, with his face pressed up to the glass and his hands under his chin.

“Bentley,” Scott says, and Bentley sighs into the glass then pulls his face away. There’s burger sauce where his mouth was. Scott sighs and passes him a napkin.

“You’re not getting on the plane and leaving it like that,” he says.

 

***

 

The plane takes off, and Scott’s hands grip his armrests tight, and he curls his feet up underneath the seat.

No matter how many times, it always feels like he’s on a rollercoaster that’s come off the tracks.

Onome looks at him thoughtfully. Bentley has started telling the man in a suit on his other side about his plans to take over the world if the Kree/Skrull war ever made its way here, and Scott thinks that maybe it’s time to swap seats.

He kind of wishes he was Dragon Man. Maybe less purple, though.

 

***

 

Darla meets them at Heathrow with a little American flag and a big paper cup of black coffee for Scott. She’s by herself, in a green hoody with the hood pulled up, but Scott recognises her straight away. “Hey kids,” he says. “Look who made it after all.”

Onome rushes to give her a hug, and Darla smiles at her, and then looks up at Scott and pokes him on the chin.

Okay, so he’s got a couple days’ worth of beard. He rubs at it.

“Come on,” she says, “Got a taxi booked.”

Scott walks behind her and the kids as they leave the airport and looks around, wondering if anybody’s going to stop him.

Nobody does.

 

***

 

“What time is it,” Bentley groans, slumped in his seat.

“I don’t know,” Scott says, with all the cheer he can muster. “Maybe you should have slept on the plane.”

Bentley huffs and starts singing a very annoying and offensive song about the atlanteans, until Darla stops him to tell him very seriously about their history. Onome can’t stop herself from smiling.

“I’ve never been to England before,” she says to Scott.

“I have,” he says, “but not like this.”

“It’s sunny,” she says.

“I don’t expect that’ll last,” he says, and smiles. “Did you sleep on the flight okay?”

She wrinkles up her nose. “Yeah, okay,” she says.  
  
By the time they get there, they’re all asleep except Darla, who has to rap them all on the head with her sunglasses to get them up and out. “Hey kids,” she says, and taps Scott on the side of his face when he frowns, “we’re here.”

Scott wasn’t expecting so much stone.

“It’s really cold,” Bentley says, and pulls his hands up inside his sleeves.

“Let’s dump your bags,” Darla says, and they do.

 

***

 

So the thing about places like Oxford is that Scott feels like a dummy in them. It’s like Cambridge, and the upper west side, and sometimes when he thinks, really thinks, about what’s happening in his lab.

He attends conference sessions with Onome and Bentley (Darla goes to a couple that touch on music but is mostly preoccupied with the Skrull carnival ride or whatever it is), and sometimes he’s amazed, sometimes he’s aware that the person talking is a crank, and a lot of the time he hears a few words and a confident tone and he looks down at the floor and wonders why he’s even wearing this badge. It has his name in thick black letters, and it says “Future Foundation” underneath. He’s not even - he’s not really - he’s, just.

Being there with kids is a good excuse to skip the drink receptions.

The kids’ presentation is on the last day of the conference. The night before, he and Darla take them out to a late-night session with music at the museum, and then put them in their rooms and say that if they don’t go straight to sleep (Scott mostly looks at Bentley here) then he’ll refuse to let them use him as a human exhibit for their talk on Pym Particle axes and human cell repair.

“They’ll probably ask you some questions after,” Onome says, as they’re saying goodnight.

“Yeah, no,” Scott says, and twists his face before he remembers that he’s supposed to be a responsible teacherly adult and he’s meant to be comfortable with talking to smart people in academic settings. “But you’ll get questions,” he says. Onome waves some notecards at him.

They just want him to punch through some things, which, fine. He can probably manage that. But he doesn’t want to talk about it with academics. He doesn’t _just_ punch things.

Not that he wants to talk about his research, either.

Scott lies on the bed and turns towards Darla. She’s got the sweater on, he realises. She lies down on the bed next to him, and touches his face.

“I missed you,” she says, “you should’ve come out to see the show. You’d love Indonesia. Great ants.”

“I know,” Scott says, and just lies there and looks at her, and he doesn’t know what to say. His throat feels like it’s about to close, and he closes his eyes and breathes in, and then out, and then he opens his eyes again. Darla looks sad, but she’s smiling.

“I missed you too,” Scott says, and pushes her hair up behind her ear and brushes her cheek with his fingers.

“Sue said you were afraid that you’d miss New York coffee cups,” she says, and runs her hand down his neck and rests it on the top of his chest, at his neckline. Scott shivers, and rests his hands in her hair, loosely rubbing one of his thumbs just above her ear.

“Can you blame me?” he asks, and kisses her.

“Yes,” she says, finally, when they pause.

“Probably fair,” Scott agrees.

“You’re here now,” Darla says, and kisses him again, “and it only took Bentley and Onome’s big dreams to do it.”

“I packed enough cups for the trip,” Scott says. “It turns out, they let you take them through customs.” He pauses. “You never asked me to visit you, you know.”

“I was afraid you’d say no,” Darla says quietly, and wraps her arms around him, and they shift closer together.

“No,” Scott says, and he flattens his hand over her nose and grins. “You’ll just have to do another tour and invite me to that one.”

Darla bats his hand away and makes a face at him, but then she laughs. “You’re really twisting my arm,” she says. “But I’m coming home. I miss New York.”

“I always knew I liked you,” Scott says.

**Author's Note:**

> i don't think there's a super science institute in oxford in the comics, but there should be.


End file.
